“Surely our griefs He Himself bore, And our sorrows He carried; Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, Smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed.†(Isaiah 53:4,5 with references in the Meditation to Matthew 4:23,24, Malachi 4:2, Matthew 9:20-22 NASB).
Meditation
Jesus lies in the street, again fallen and in pain. The crowd shouts and kicks dust. A few are weeping. They seem strong compared to him. Life courses through their bodies, while his ebbs away. Strange … some of these very bodies he’s touched and healed. Throughout Galilee he’s taught and preached and cured every sickness making a reputation so that even those in far away places come.
Now he is weighed down with all that has plagued them. Every sickness and disease, every pain and calamity to strike them is falling on him with violence.
It is one thing to be a healer, to look with compassion on the sick and suffering, to reach out a hand and release the divine power that will restore them to wholeness; it is another to hold out that hand and receive their crushing pains, their wasting diseases, every acute and chronic thing that makes them suffer and die.
But this is what he must do to save them – to join them in their guilt and in their sufferings – to enter fully into their humanity with the fullness of his divinity. It’s what the Father ordains. It’s what the Father has always ordained. That they are fallen into affliction means he must be there too. It’s where his people are.
“The kingdom vision of Jesus is a kingdom filled up with people who are noted by one word: love.” (One.Life, p. 48) The Apostle Paul put it this way: “For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.” (Gal. 5:6, MSG)
McKnight approaches this by first examining our tendency as Christians to approach the life of faith as a matter of being “right”—having the right religious opinions and following the right religious practices. The religious authorities in Jesus’ day taught people to live “right” by obeying the scriptures. In order to help them know how to obey, the leaders clarified the commandments, adding laws designed to set forth situational applications of the “big-idea” laws God had given.
The Torah contained 613 laws. To these were added “halakot”—official religious rulings that set forth specific ways of keeping the laws. The intention may have been good. They were “applying” the Scriptures. They were being “practical”— (1) The Torah said, “Keep the Sabbath.” (2) People want to know how to do that, so (3) here’s a list of examples. But we all know how this works. It is not very long before the big idea gets forgotten while the rules remain. The life of faith thereafter becomes defined as merely keeping the rules, and the religious leaders and institutions become invested in making sure the rules get kept.
Jesus opposed this approach. Read Matthew 23 and you’ll see how adamant his opposition was. But Jesus did more than cry out against the halakot approach of the scribes and Pharisees. He replaced theirs with his own halakot. Do you want to know how to keep the 613 commands of God? Jesus ruled that they could all be fulfilled if we would focus on just one of them (in its two aspects)—Love God, and love your neighbor (Matt 22:34-40).
What Jesus said to the religulous of his day was this: You are fixated on your love of Torah and judging others by whether or not they live up to your standards and your rulings, but what you must understand, is that God gave us a Torah of love. (p. 52)
In one of the key chapters in One.Life, Scot McKnight argues that this love is at the very heart of the kingdom Jesus calls us to imagine and embrace.
But I am a worm and not a man,
scorned by everyone, despised by the people.
All who see me mock me;
they hurl insults, shaking their heads.
“He trusts in the LORD,†they say,
“let the LORD rescue him.
Let him deliver him,
since he delights in him.â€
(Psalm 22: 6-8, NIV. Also see 2 Samuel 16.)
Meditation
It is much safer to be a part of a mob than to stand on your own. Mobs move collectively in anger or confusion or violence. But it is a group effort—no one person is made to be in the spotlight. The crowd that is following Jesus as he staggers up the hill toward Golgotha jeers him as one. They are united in their vitriol. With one voice they hurl insults at the innocent Lamb of God.
David suffered insults from a mob of one as he fled Jerusalem. Shimei cursed the king with vile contempt. Yet David, foreshadowing the response of the Eternal King, refused to retaliate. He accepted the harsh words as his due.
Jesus is not just carrying the cross to his death—he is also carrying our shame, our abuse, our insults. He is being verbally assaulted as he stumbles under the weight of wood and sin. Blood from the crown of thorns mixes with sweat and spit to blind him with stabbing pain to his eyes. And still the mob jeers him with words that stab his heart.
But then a woman steps out from the crowd. Veronica is her name. She has nothing to offer Jesus but a simple cloth–and her love. She bathes his face with her cloth, wiping away the salty blood and sweat. She gazes into his eyes. What does she see? Does she see the Lord of Love looking on her with mercy? With grace? With thanks?
I have always considered evangelicals (including myself) weak in the area of imagination. The evangelical or fundamentalist tradition has been, by and large, a prosaic tradition, characterized by simple logic, plain spokenness, common sense, and an iconoclastic rather than an aesthetic ethos. There is a certain literalism at its heart that carries with it a suspicion of metaphor, poetry, myth, mystery, ambiguity, symbolism, and open-ended questions. Evangelical faith is expository faith — it must explain. It values answers and certainty. It wants to “nail things down,” not set the mind and heart free to imagine and explore the possibilities. Its focus is captured in the immortal words of Detective Joe Friday, “Just the facts, ma’am.”
In some situations, this can be a strength. Overall, I think not.
That’s why I was so glad to see Scot McKnight take up the subject of imagination in his book, One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow. Scot notes how reading fiction and entering into its stories and characters “lengthens the horizons of my life and expands my vision of what life can be,” and then talks about how and why Jesus used fiction in the form of parables to teach about God’s Kingdom. “His parables draw us into the kingdom world and then they set us back down in this world hungering for more, hungering for a kingdom kind of world now.” (p. 38)
In other words, Jesus did not give us “just the facts.” He told stories. He stimulated our imagination. He prompted us to envision a different life, a different world, different relationships, a different God than the one expositors explain in theological prose. The One.Life of following Jesus is the Imagined.Life.
The Sower (1888), van Gogh
Jesus’ parables help us “see” with our imaginations how God is at work in the ordinary acts and affairs of our lives. Surprisingly, we discover that God is not “religious”! He is out there with farmers planting seeds and with workers hiring laborers. He’s up early with women baking bread and up late at night when a neighbor knocks on the door to borrow bread. He’s out in the heat of the day with foreigners who help strangers in trouble on the side of the road. He is with fishermen pulling in their catch and throwing back the ones they don’t want.
These “ordinary” situations become “extraordinary” when our imaginations move us to realize that life has additional dimensions beyond what our senses can access. There is an unseen world around us, where the invisible Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of all is constantly active, always at work, present and ever engaged in the life of his creation.
In Jesus, this unseen realm has intersected with ours in earnest — ”the Kingdom is at hand! — and because it has, we can believe that the smallest actions of our lives with him can have significant, even eternal consequences.
In One.Life, Scot McKnight examines several paradigm-changing insights that grow out of Jesus’ parables. But the big point is this: truth and life so wondrous as that which Jesus came to give cannot be held within theological definitions and teaching outlines, classroom lectures and debates. The world God wants to create can’t merely be explained, it must be imagined, and most of all, it must be lived.
Sower (after Millet), van Gogh
This parabolic dream kingdom begins, Jesus says, with the imagination. First you listen to his stories and enter into them imaginatively, the way you enter into your favorite novel’s characters.
… You begin thinking about very ordinary things, like fields and farmers and workers and women baking and men picking wheat and wounded people, and suddenly you find yourself transported into a brand new world and a brand new way of thinking. This vision of Jesus will take a conversion of our imagination… (p. 44)
In Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, C.S. Lewis wrote, “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
Jesus’ stories open windows to that place, that realm, that Kingdom where God rules and God acts, which intersects with our world in the most surprising ways, making the ordinary extraordinary and beautiful.
The Procession to Calvary by Pieter Bruegel the ElderScripture
“A certain man from Cyrene, Simon, the Father of Alexander and Rufus, was passing by on his way in from the country, and they forced him to carry the cross†(Mark 15:21 with references in the Meditation to Exodus 12:1-36, Matthew 16:24, Luke 23:26, Romans 16:13).
Meditation
Jesus staggers. The cross beam he is carrying is more than half his weight and he is nearly dead already. He’s fallen once and through clouds of pain and weakness that threaten to snuff out consciousness he hears weeping. They are the voices of the women who have followed him through the streets of Jerusalem. His own mother is among them. Knowing of their sorrow … her sorrow … causes compassion to rise even in his agony.
The procession has come to an intersection of streets and streaming people. The ones accompanying Jesus follow along to witness his crucifixion. In the case of some, it is out of perverse curiosity, the permeating influence of Rome’s lust for public bloodshed or in the case of those who love him, helpless horror. Converging on them are pilgrims coming in from the country, on their way to celebrate Passover. The holy feast is a time to remember how, on the eve of their escape from Egypt, God instructed Israel to put the blood of a sacrificed lamb on the lintel and posts of each home’s doorway. The angel of death that came striking down the firstborn of every Egyptian household that night passed over Israel’s families as they obeyed the command.
The lead guard calls a halt, ordering his subordinates to untangle the knotted crowd and give the rabbi a moment to rest. They want him alive for the crucifixion.
Today is the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of what is considered the official beginning of the American Civil War—the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter, near Charleston, SC (April 12-13, 1861).
Ft. Sumter was one of five Union forts that remained in the newly formed Confederacy. In the months preceding the battle, U.S. Army forces held the fort but found themselves increasingly under seige, short of men, food, supplies, and weapons. This was the first crisis faced by President Abraham Lincoln, who had just taken office in March, shortly after seven states, led by South Carolina, had declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America. Lincoln notified South Carolina’s governor Pickens that he would be resupplying the fort. In response, the Confederate government ordered that the U.S. army forces evacuate Ft. Sumter at once.
At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, Confederate forces under the command of Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard began bombarding the fort with artillery fire. Within thirty-four hours, the army forces, significantly outmatched, agreed to evacuate. Not a single person was killed in the battle (though one perished because of an accident). Yet this “bloodless” battle inaugurated our nation’s bloodiest conflict.
In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee,  to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.  The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.â€
Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.  But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God.  You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.  He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David,  and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.â€
“How will this be,†Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?â€
The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.  Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.â€
“I am the Lord’s servant,†Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.†Then the angel left her  (Luke 1:26-38, NLT). (See also Luke 2:25-32)
I am a self-described “post-evangelical.” Nevertheless, I still believe this movement which formed the context of my life for thirty years gets some things right. One concept they grasp well is MISSION. The evangelical groups with whom I have been involved have been committed to participating in the Missio Dei, God’s mission in the world. Now, they have sometimes narrowly defined that mission, and at other times they have perverted participation in God’s mission into a programmatic style of activism centered around the institutional church that misses the mark, in my view.
However, today, younger and more progressive evangelicals in particular are attempting to restore some balance and breadth to our understanding of the church’s missional activity. Scot McKnight’s book, One.Life, encourages that. In fact, he sets this missional identity as the framework for the entire Christian life.
“We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all†(Isaiah 53:6, with references in the Meditation to Matthew 27:27-31, Mark 15:15-20, John 19:17,18, Psalm 38:4, Leviticus 16:5-22, 2 Corinthians 5:21, Romans 5:10, Ephesians 5:14).
Meditation
The blood and sweat streaming into Jesus’ eyes is burning and blinding him. The crown of twisted thorns the soldiers pressed into his skull to mock him is a piercing agony. Each contraction of his laboring heart sends a throb of pure pain throughout his flayed torso.  The cloth of his garment lies imbedded in blood, stuck to bone, meshed with shredded muscle. Yet, there is a weightier agony torturing him. It is his cross.
He is carrying the beam through narrow streets and jeering crowds. Jesus is on his way to Golgotha where the stake is already driven—the place where the two pieces, stake and beam, will become one and he will die. Now, he is stumbling under the startling seven stone weight, head pitched forward, sight blurred, placing one foot in front of the other determined not to fall.
A new baby boy was born into the world today at 5:30pm.
, he examines Jesus’ call to a life of love.
, C.S. Lewis wrote, “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
. In addition, beginning here and now, we will consider some of Scot McKnight’s challenging and encouraging teaching from his new book, 
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